Business enterprise systems can be broken down into two types of subsystems:
online transaction processing (“OLTP”) subsystems and online analytical processing (“OLAP”) subsystems. OLTP subsystems are used by organizations to carry out day to day business processes of the organization. In contrast, OLAP subsystems are used to provide decision making abilities for an organization through data analysis. SAP Business Information Warehouse™ (“SAP BW”) is a type of OLAP subsystem that includes data warehouses and business intelligence (“BI”) tools that allow for data reporting by storing business related data in a data warehouse and later uploading the data from a corresponding operational system (“OS”). SAP BW allows for cataloguing the data and making the data available to an end user for analytics and other business uses through model reports.
In existing OLAP subsystems, content is delivered from an OLAP subsystem using data objects that represent a type, characteristic, or attribute (“InfoObjects”). These InfoObjects can be used by the OLAP to model master data and serve as attributes in data storage structures. A query can be run by a user to find a matching InfoObject. An attribute corresponding to the InfoObject can be further analyzed to produce further attributes of the InfoObject. In these implementations however, reports generated in the OLAP subsystems and the InfoObjects themselves, cannot be linked to the business activities of the OLTP subsystem. The inability to link the relevant reports generated by the OLAP subsystem to the correct transactions in the OLTP subsystem, prevents the users from making an informed decision during the transaction itself.
Thus there remains a need in the art, for a system which allows for the mapping of data reports from OLAP subsystems to individual transactions in an OLTP subsystem. There also remains a need in the art, for mapping metadata from a transaction in a business enterprise system to query metadata in a data warehouse.